SMI: Gravure Inks

High Quality Gravure Inks Using Specialty Minerals’ Calcium Carbonates

Gravure inks are used for some of the highest quality and most demanding printing jobs: publications, packaging, currency, and stock certificates. However, even the inks for these premium or long-run applications come under stringent cost constraints.

The ultrafine or nano, and the superfine precipitated calcium carbonates from Specialty Minerals Inc. (SMI) can help reduce the costs of formulating gravure inks, while helping to increase quality and performance.

Gravure Ink Performance with Precipitated Calcium Carbonate
The small particled precipitated calcium carbonates (PCCs) from SMI can be useful in developing inks with high gloss and excellent optical properties. By spacing particles of costly color pigments apart, PCCs enhance color strength development. At moderate filler loadings, the ultrafine PCC grades can also contribute mild rheological control, helping to ensure high image clarity and dot sharpness, reducing mottle and spilling or squeeze-out of the ink, without excessive viscosity build.

Gravure inks must have very low abrasion to avoid excessive wear of printing cylinders, doctor blades and other parts of the print train. Abrasion comes from using hard minerals and minerals of large particle sizes. Precipitated calcium carbonates are relatively soft fillers, only one-fourth as abrasive as silicas. And the very small particle sizes—0.07 or 0.7 micron median—keeps abrasion levels low.

Specialty Minerals Products For Gravure Inks
Two families of SMI PCCs find utility in rotogravure inks—ultrafine and superfine. Each family has both uncoated, hydrophilic grades, and coated, hydrophobic grades for aqueous and non-aqueous formulations.

Uncoated ultrafine PCCs are named Multifex-MM^® PCC in the U.S. and Calofort^® U in the U.K. With median particle sizes of 0.07 microns, these products are true nano particles—less than 100 nanometers or 0.1 micron.

The stearic acid coated nano counterparts are Ultra-Pflex^® PCC in the U.S. and Calofort^® S in the U.K. Coating the PCC particle improves dispersion and compatibility in solvent systems. Both the uncoated and coated functional fillers have very low abrasion, provide the highest gloss, provide maximum extension of prime pigments, and have moderate oil absorptions, which would keep viscosities low at light to medium filler loadings.

Albafil^® PCC, a 0.7 micron particle, is an uncoated superfine precipitated calcium carbonate., and Super-Pflex^® 100 is the coated version. They both possess many of the same attributes as the nano grades, at a lower cost, for applications where performance demands are less than the maximum.

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